I love comics, cartoons, movies, video games, and can’t stop admiring all the great art spawned trough that mediums.

A dream from my childhood, to become professional CGI artist (after seeing Jurassic Park 1993) combined with my affection towards Dinosaurs that I started liking since I was a 10 years old, resulted in DinoMonsters concept. Idea behind DinoMonsters actually came to me when I was modeling one Dinosaur model.

I started thinking how cool would be to make humanized dinosaur, or a dinosaurized man. That’s how it all started, and before you knew it, I made up 6 characters. At first I thought I had original idea, but later I discovered several similar concepts involving Dino man characters. So, you could say, they aren’t original, but by the great feedback I received from the 3D community from different forums, I guess I did a good job.

The difficult part of DinoMonsters was to give them all distinctive look, and again, to keep the visuals together, as if they belong to the same team, and exist in the same universe. As an aspiring character artist, thinking about characters is more of a reflex to me.

So, making them apart was easy, but getting them out of the head and into viewport is more challenging. But even if it was hard at some point to create them, with today’s great software it is all achievable.

When you think about making something like this in 3d apps like Maya or Max few years ago, it would take three times longer period to get it done, and still wouldn’t look as nice as it looks today. We, who love and live CGI, are lucky to be living in renaissance era of CGI. It’s on us now to make it memorable by producing great and inspiring imagery for our future ancestors.

STEP 1- This is how it looked in the beginning. Low poly model for DinoMonsters character. Same low poly object rendered in multiple angles.

Step 2 - In the below image, above the characters you can see the set of brushes I use to shape low poly object. To get the desired proportions and major shapes I use Move brush. Standard and inflate brushes are the best when you need to add volumes across the mesh.

Clay brush comes in handy when modeling muscles, especially later as you start to subdivide your mesh, and start adding more distinctive lines to the character.

Step 3 - This is the phase where I am pretty much satisfied with the overall shape. Now I start with subdivisions, and gradually add more and more details to the model. In this phase, the model is more or less ready for next level. Accessorizing!